Virtual Selection: The Rise of the Survival Game

If it were possible to place games under a microscope and look at their atomic structure you'd probably find a few particles of survival in almost every one. Staying alive and one step of ahead of the competition is a vital element of first-person-shooters, strategy games and of course survival horror, while every other role-playing game pitches your dwarf peasant farmer against some world-eating adversary. Even platformers and racing games are about avoiding cavernous gaps or crashing into concrete walls.

Despite its prevalence, this fundamental gaming theme has only been brought to the fore in the last couple of years, as several games have adopted survival as their central concept. There has been an explosion of interest in survival-themed games, from Minecraft to Tomb Raider. But what is behind this sudden surge in popularity, and how is this new genre likely to affect the course of the industry? Pack your tent and rucksack, and follow me.

Typically, a survival game will blend exploration, resource-gathering, crafting in an environment with some kind of ever-present risk or threat which the player must avoid or in some cases fight. It's tempting to encapsulate this genre’s rise in popularity in a single word: Minecraft. And no doubt, that first night of a game of Minecraft, spent huddled in a hastily dug cave while zombies and creepers prowl the night, was millions of gamers’ introduction to survival gaming.

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Survival games offer a different proposition: you are not at the top of the food chain any more.

Ironically though, while Minecraft certainly brought survival gaming to prominence, survival is only a small part of its overarching structure. It’s entirely optional, and even in Survival mode it's fairly easy to accommodate for basic needs, at which point the game becomes more focused on the player's imagination.

"Minecraft is a great game, but it really doesn’t push the survival aspect very hard," says Kevin Forbes, one of the programmers behind Klei Entertainment's recently released survival game Don't Starve. "At its core I think it’s really more about creativity and self-expression, which is awesome but different."

Don't Starve takes the ideas present in the first few days of a Minecraft game and expands upon them, building the entire experience around surviving a brutal, unforgiving wilderness. "Survival games offer a different proposition: you are not at the top of the food chain any more. In fact, just staying alive is hard," Forbes says. "Given that the odds are stacked against you, it can be really intrinsically rewarding when you manage to accomplish anything."

Challenge is central to Don't Starve's spin on the this genre. Everything is a potential threat, from the weather to the dark to the unseen monstrosities that lurk within it. Even your own body fights against you. Unlike most games, the player's state of being is not static. Stand still for long enough and you'll simply starve to death. Therefore the player must constantly venture into the unknown, weighing up the risk of moving away from the safety of your camp with the potential reward of finding new materials to craft more advanced items.

Ironically, balancing this difficulty curve is in itself extremely difficult. "Don’t Starve is meant to be a hard game, and an unforgiving one," Forbex explains. "It deletes your save file when you make a mistake, and it doesn’t care if you’ve invested 8 hours or so into building your base. A certain type of player really likes this combination, but it can be very off-putting at first." The difficulty inherent in pitching the difficulty is evident in the fact that neither Minecraft nor Don't Starve manage a perfect balance, Minecraft being slightly too easy, and Don't Starve being slightly too tough.

Games designed to challenge the player have enjoyed a mini-renaissance lately. Examples such as Dark Souls, Spelunky and FTL have all proved themselves exceedingly popular, and the Survival game fits rather neatly into this trend. But there’s more to the survival game’s appeal than a heightened level of adversity. Because they usually cast the player in a role where they are weak rather than strong, direct confrontation with any hostile force is usually a bad idea, certainly to begin with. Therefore more creative solutions to the problem of keeping alive are required.

This brains over brawn approach reflects the history of our own ascendency as a species. Hence survival games play on the same psychological drives that kept us alive for thousands of years, those which lie dormant in the majority of today’s societies .

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The brains over brawn approach reflects the history of our own ascendency as a species.

Survival games condense aeons of human achievement into a few hours’ play, allowing you to progress upward from the default human status of bald, clumsy monkey through accomplishing many small yet gratifying goals: from making a fire in Don’t Starve to constructing an automated irrigation system in Minecraft. In short, where an FPS provides an animal problem with an animal solution - brute force - the survival game provides an animal problem with a human solution.

It’s fitting, then, that technological progression has also played a significant role in the rise of the survival game. You need a world to explore, usually a large one, and there are two ways to accomplish this: hire a huge team of developers to painstakingly hand-craft everything, or procedurally generate it.

Procedural generation is nothing new. Developers have used procedural algorithms to generate large landscapes since the eighties. But more powerful platforms allow for greater complexity, and with the survival genre it seems to have found a natural home, enabling the creation of enormous worlds without a skyrocketing budget.

This doesn't mean it's a straightforward solution, especially for a developer like Klei, which is used to hand-painting everything. "Our original placeholder world generation algorithm produced 'ball and sprocket' worlds made of large circular land masses connected by narrow bridges. It was really quite hideous, but to this day some long-time players ask for it to come back as a selectable option."

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It’s fitting that technological progression has also played a significant role in the rise of the survival game.

Don't Starve is very much the epitome of what you would expect from a survival game. Yet while most share many common traits, their implementation can be very different. Miasmata is a survival game developed by ionFX, a developer with a team of just two people, brothers Bob and Joe Johnson. It was inspired by their childhood experiences on long family camping trips in remote American wildernesses.

"We would spend at least a week in the middle of what's called the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Northern Minnesota, which is just this big National Forest. Very secluded, no cellphone service," says Bob Johnson. "In fact we would go days at a time without ever running into any other people, and we would go for miles."

All the usual features of a survival game are present in Miasmata - exploration, resource gathering, evasion of a threat, even procedural generation – but each of these is used in a very different way from Don't Starve. Due to the tiny size of their team, ionFX used procedural generation to outline the basic landmass of the island, and then hand placed the island's content, from structures to individual plants. Similarly, exploring this island involves using real cartography to get your bearings and triangulate the position of new landmarks on your map, and instead of gathering food and building supplies, the player must locate the many different types of plants around the island in order to synthesize a cure for the disease they are afflicted with.

But perhaps the most fundamental difference between Miasmata and other survival games is how the player gets around the island. Movement is based on momentum, meaning it takes time to stop after running, and the character will slide on slopes. Move too fast on a slope and the character will fall over, injuring him. "When we thought about placing a player alone on this desolate island, we really needed to occupy a person's time, and I think we gravitated toward this idea of 'Why don't we make the world itself be a challenge?' So the terrain constantly keeps you on your toes and thinking about your next step."

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When done well, weakness and vulnerability can be far more interesting that killing everything that appears on screen.

It's a very clever device. Making simply moving about a challenge keeps the struggle for survival consistent. Every step has to be considered, and each hill climb requires a small amount of planning. To further complicate matters, the risk of falling over is pitched against another danger on the island: a lone, invincible creature that actively hunts the player. "From time to time we thought maybe we’d have two or three different creatures that had regions of the island,” Johnson says. "Ultimately we decided on that one. You develop a relationship with the creature in some sense."

Miasmata is particularly intriguing because it is first-person, a framework that has historically been associated with guns and power-fantasies. Like Minecraft and Don’t Starve, Miasmata once again demonstrates that when done well, weakness and vulnerability can be far more interesting that killing everything that appears on screen. Removing weapons also encourages the developer to keep players occupied in other ways. Alongside cartography and botany, Miasmata also has a story, told through notes left by an earlier scientific expedition.

"I was really inspired by Portal. From time to time you would take a turn and find this little area where you'd see some scribblings on the wall," Johnson points out. "To me that's the best way to tell a story in a videogame, through just little bits and pieces and let the player figure out the rest themselves."

IonFX is planning to take the first-person survival theme further with its next game as well. "We're just really gonna emphasise the survival aspect," says Johnson. "We've been working on this climbing mechanic for cliffs which we're really excited about." And it isn't just IonFX developing new worlds to brave the virtual elements in. There are many upcoming wildernesses to explore, from indie titles such as The Forest and Sir, You are Being Hunted to bigger games like the standalone version of DayZ , and perhaps most surprisingly of all, Epic's first Unreal Engine 4 game Fortnite.

That last example is particularly telling. For Unreal Engine 4 to debut with a survival game, rather than a first-person shooter as every other iteration of the engine has done, shows starkly how popular survival gaming has become. Indeed, in an entirely appropriate twist, survival games are poised to become one the dominant gaming genres – maybe even the most dominant.

Rick Lane is a virtual explorer for IGN and many other websites and magazines. You can hear more of his survival stories on Twitter.